Pure unadulterated silliness from start to finish - wonderful!
Channelling the spirit of Michael Bentine and following on from the ground-breaking tomfoolery of The Goons, Tim Vine stands out among the modern 'set' for being one of very few comedians who have the ability to engage with an educated adult audience with trivial mundane nonsense and entertain us until our sides split with laughter!
His style is manic, deliberately seemingly disorganised, and your own brain has to be working ten-to-the-dozen in order to keep up with his quick-fire repartee and crazy antics. As always some of his material deliberately is without punchline - the fact that there is no punchline being the punchline, if that makes any sense at all! - and some of his material is just so outlandish and bizarre that you simply have to laugh.
Known primarily for his puns - and I believe he still holds the record for the number of puns told in one minute - he delivers these with a self-effacing almost apologetic smile, as if to say, 'yeah it's bad, but you trying writing an hour's worth of puns that haven't been done before and see what you come up with!' But they are not bad at all, they are all fabulous and we laugh harder and harder as they roll from his tongue with accustomed ease.
With silly props for one-line gags, music, dancing, audience interaction and singing [Vine actually has a lovely mellow baritone voice if he were only to use it properly!] this was pure, unadulterated silliness from start to finish - wonderful!
We loved his new material, we enjoyed hearing again one or two of the jokes which we have heard before, and we simply howled with delight at his regular routines such as 'You Are The Oldest Person In The Room'; and of course his now world-famous 'Pen Behind The Ear' routine! He is fast, zany, non-stop and simply fabulous!
His final song sung wearing his 'recycle helmet' (pictured) and his BeeGees tribute song were highlights in a show that had no low-lights!
Furthermore - during the entire evening not a single swear word was spoken, not a single sexual innuendo mooted, and there wasn't even the slightest trace of smut. Yes - comedy can be and is funny without resorting to lewdness and profanity. Comedians of the world take note; if Tim Vine can do it - so can everyone. I could take my grandma and my 4 year old niece to this show and they would both have a great time!
One thing that did surprise me a little though was that Vine had a support act. In this evening's case it was comedy magician John Archer. Completely different in stylistic approach from Vine, but you could tell immediately why he had been chosen as support - their approach to comedy and their love of silliness and clean-cut humour was the same. Archer was slow, deliberate and thoughtful in his set, in complete opposition to Vine; but interspersed his magic and jokes with a couple of songs on the ukelele - and again, had a wonderfully sonorous voice. The lottery numbers trick was superb. A large personality who really ought to have his own tour, I wanted more!
The best comedy show I have been to in many many years, and I have never laughed so much and so loudly! Punillicious!
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 16/10/18
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